The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson. Volume VI: Life by Communion, 1842 (review)

This is the sixth in Patrick Carey's projected seven-volume collection of Orestes A. Brownson's Early Works. The first volume appeared in 2000 (see ante 87 [July, 2001], 530-531.) All but the last of this volume's twelve selections were published in 1842, two years before Brownson was received into the Catholic Church on October 20, 1844. Carey takes the title Life by Communion from a philosophical doctrine of the French socialist Pierre Leroux (1797-1871).

As Brownson explained life by communion in the volume's central essay, "Leroux on Humanity," "the ME can never manifest itself, that is live, save in communion with the NOT-ME" (p. 276). This "metaphysical principle" helped Brownson to think his way out of the subjectivism of modern philosophy. Brownson's language—he speaks of the subject and object as "so to speak soldered together, or amalgamated as the acid and the alkali in the formation of neutral salt" (p. 254)—suggests that he may not have been entirely successful in dissolving modern philosophy's subject-object dichotomy. Nevertheless, life by communion incited in him "a theological revolution" (p. 189) that restored him "to the great household of believers," (p. 276), "touched his heart," and instilled in him "a love [for preaching] I never felt before" (p. 216).

Such is the language of religious conversion and Carey's fifty-four-page introduction argues that, during 1842, Brownson experienced a real religious conversion, one that he later explained as a discovery of God's freedom. This conversion enabled him to turn Leroux's life by communion to his own theological purposes and transcend the naturalism and subjectivism of Transcendental and Unitarian theology. The selections in this volume, arranged chronologically, take the reader through Brownson's intellectual and religious odyssey from Transcendental theology to a kind of Romantic traditionalist theology that enabled him to save and reaffirm both the supernatural character of special providence and the ordinary workings of human nature understood according to life by communion. Carey's introduction, an expansion of Chapter 4 of his recent biography of Brownson, offers the reader an excellent guide. "The Mediatorial Life," Brownson's open letter to William Ellery Channing, and "Theodore Parker's Discourse" are the most theologically substantive of these essays, but in other essays Brownson applies life by communion to politics and society as well.

Brownson's son, Henry, reluctantly included some of these essays in his edition of Brownson's Works, four in a volume he entitled Heterodox Writings. Nevertheless, Carey's introduction, his arrangement of the essays, detailed editorial footnotes, and twenty-page index of names and subjects illustrate why this series belongs in all libraries with serious collections in the area of American religious history. This volume is particularly valuable. Not only does it make available key contributions of an often neglected participant in the debates of New England theology in the 1830's and 1840's, but it also gives the reader a sometimes touching glimpse into an expansive and brilliant Christian soul.